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June 11, 1982
New generation
By ABRAHAM RABINOVICH
Somewhere in the hills south of the Lebanese border, the
ghost of the Agranat Commission was laid to rest this week.
The army that emerged from the Galilee along the three routes
leading across the border bore not even a slight resemblance
to the ill-equipped, ill-maintained and ill-disciplined army
described by the government panel that investigated the blunders
of the Yom Kippur War.
The army this week presented an extraordinary spectacle that
was a reflection no so much of Israel's national character
as of what most Israelis would like that character to comprise.
Discipline, organization, neatness and attention to detail
were manifest in the convoys that moved north in endless lines
throughout the week.
Convoy discipline was superb. A lot of serious people had
evidently given a lot of serious thought to the problem of
efficiently sending an army into battle along a limited network
of narrow roads. Day and night, the convoys of trucks and
tank-bearing trailers roared through uninterrupted. Instead
of arguments over right-of-way traffic jams, military policemen
at crossroads kept the well-orchestrated flow moving.
The paucity of breakdowns indicated a high level of vehicle
maintenance. When mechanical trouble did occur, it was swiftly
handled. Near Banias, for instance, a tank repair team could
be seen lifting an engine out of a disabled tank at the side
of the road and quickly replacing it with a new one.
The way a long column of armored personnel carriers parked
at a border roadside, virtually bumper to bumper as if on
parade, as the infantrymen waited for the attack order, said
something about discipline. So did the way a tank unit spread
out methodically as it crossed the border at Metulla in battle
formation. The enormous amount of equipment carried on the
outside of the armored vehicles was neatly strapped down.
It was an army without dangling threads.
Equipment was modern, not hand-me-down at least not in
the first-line units. In some of the later waves the half-tracks
and the men were older, but clearly still serviceable. The
milk vans and other mobilized civilian vehicles seen in previous
wars and the motley collection of uniforms had no place in
the army that went to war this week.
It was a good-looking army whose size and latent power were
stunning.
One could not help feeling that the men who had shaped this
kind of army knew also how to use it when the shooting started.
Before the shooting started, one was not inhibited about
regarding the army moving into battle as a spectacle and even
looking for social insights. In its discipline and organization,
this army was ahead of the nation; but the fact that it could
be shaped suggested that the nation was coming up behind it.
In a Galilee hotel, where we were served breakfast by an
attractive waitress from the nearby development town of Hatzor,
the proprietor said that a decade ago he had been unable to
find girls in Hatzor who were employable. "There are now lots
of bright young people. One of my girls is even studying law.
There is a new generation," he said.
Israel has never been short of adversity against which to
test itself. To those standing by the roadsides in Galilee
this week, it seemed like a new generation was responding.
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